Junk DNA: goodbye! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 19, 2013, 01:19 (4084 days ago) @ David Turell

Latest discovery. Most junk DNa seems to be functional:-"The remaining 150,000 initiation machines—those Pugh and Venters did not find right at genes—remained somewhat mysterious. "These initiation machines that were not associated with genes were clearly active since they were making RNA and aligned with fragments of RNA discovered by other scientists," Pugh said. "In the early days, these fragments of RNA were generally dismissed as irrelevant since they did not code for proteins." Pugh added that it was easy to dismiss these fragments because they lacked a feature called polyadenylation—a long string of genetic material, adenosine bases—that protect the RNA from being destroyed. Pugh and Venters further validated their surprising findings by determining that these non-coding initiation machines recognized the same DNA sequences as the ones at coding genes, indicating that they have a specific origin and that their production is regulated, just like it is at coding genes.
 
"These non-coding RNAs have been called the 'dark matter' of the genome because, just like the dark matter of the universe, they are massive in terms of coverage—making up over 95 percent of the human genome. However, they are difficult to detect and no one knows exactly what they all are doing or why they are there," Pugh said. "Now at least we know that they are real, and not just 'noise' or 'junk.' Of course, the next step is to answer the question, 'what, in fact, do they do?'"-
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-genomic-dark.html#jCp-Study this carefully. We know DNA makes proteins, but a collection of proteins is just that, an amorphous collection. Each body plan must have instructions, which to this point have not been found. If most of DNA is functional, not junk, then the plan is there and we will find it.